Remote viewing is the ability to gather information about a distant or
unseen target using paranormal means or extra-sensory perception or
sensing with mind.

Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an
object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.

The Stargate Project was a $20 million research program designed to
gather information for the US military and government which was later
scrapped due to a lack of documented evidence.

In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board,
chaired by DIA chief Soyster, appointed an Army Colonel, William
Johnson, to manage the remote viewing unit and evaluate its objective
usefulness.

According
to an account by former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith (2005),
Johnson spent several months running the remote viewing unit against
military and DEA targets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote
viewing's validity as a phenomenon but in its usefulness as an
intelligence tool.

Despite being designated by his superiors as “Destined to wear stars,”
he resigned his commission in 1995 after his decision to write Psychic
Warrior, a book in which he details his experiences as a remote viewer
in the Stargate Project.

He is the director of David Morehouse
productions, and his company has trained 15,000 civilians in Remote
Viewing Techniques.

Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means, in particular, extra-sensory perception (ESP) or sensing with mind.

Scientific studies have been conducted, and although some earlier, less sophisticated experiments produced positive results, none of the newer experiments concluded with such results when under properly controlled conditions, and therefore, like any other forms of ESP, constitutes pseudoscience.

Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974.

The Stargate Project was the umbrella code name of one of several sub-projects established by the U.S. Federal Government to investigate the reality, and potential military and domestic applications, of psychic phenomena, particularly "remote viewing": the purported ability to psychically "see" events, sites, or information from a great distance.

These projects were active from the 1970s through 1995, and followed up early psychic research done at The Stanford Research Institute (SRI), The American Society for Psychical Research, and other psychical research labs.

The Stargate Project created a set of protocols designed to make the research of clairvoyance and out-of-body experiences more scientific, and to minimize as much as possible session noise and inaccuracy. The term "remote viewing" emerged as shorthand to describe this more structured approach to clairvoyance.

From World War II until the 1970s the US government occasionally funded ESP research.

When the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were conducting ESP research, it became receptive to the idea of having its own competing psi research program.

At the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and
1980s, Targ and his colleague Harold E. Puthoff co-founded a 23-year,
$25-million program of research into psychic abilities and their
operational use for the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA,
Defense Intelligence Agency and Army Intelligence.

These
abilities are referred to collectively as "remote viewing." Targ and
Puthoff both believe that Uri Geller, retired police commissioner Pat
Price, and artist Ingo Swann all had genuine psychic abilities. They
published their findings in Nature and the Proceedings of the IEEE.

From
1972 to 1995 the program was classified SECRET and compartmentalized
with Limited Access. That is to say, the program was not only
classified, but every single person who was informed about the program
had to personally sign a so-called bigot list, to acknowledge that they
had been exposed to the program data.

However, their work met
criticism from some, including psychologists David Marks and Richard
Kammann in their 1980 book, The Psychology of the Psychic.Stargate only received a mission after all other intelligence attempts, methods, or approaches had already been exhausted.

At its peak, Stargate had as many as 14 labs researching remote viewing.

It was also reported that there were over 22 active military and domestic remote viewers providing data. When the project closed in 1995 this number had dwindled down to three. One was using tarot cards.

People leaving the project were not replaced. According to Joseph McMoneagle, "The Army never had a truly open attitude toward psychic functioning". Hence, the use of the term "giggle factor" and the saying, "I wouldn't want to be found dead next to a psychic."

A struggle between unbelievers and believers in the sponsor
organizations provided much of the program's actual drama.

Each side
seems to have been utterly convinced that the other's views were wrong.

As with all intelligence information,
intelligence gathered by remote viewing must be verified by other
sources.

Remote-viewing information could not stand alone. (According to
Ray Hyman in the AIR report, if Ed May's conclusions are correct remote
viewers were right 20% of the time and wrong 80% of the time.)

In 1995, the project was transferred to the CIA and a retrospective evaluation of the results was done. The CIA contracted the American Institutes for Research for an evaluation. On June 30th, before the AIR review was to begin, the CIA closed the Stargate project. An analysis conducted by Professor Jessica Utts showed a statistically significant effect, with gifted subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance, though subject reports included a large amount of irrelevant information, and when reports did seem on target they were vague and general in nature.

Ray Hyman argued that Utts' conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist, especially precognition, "is premature and that present findings have yet to be independently replicated."

Based upon both of their collected findings, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls, the CIA terminated the 20 million dollar project, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community.

Time magazine stated in 1995 three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon close up shop.

Various skeptic organizations have conducted experiments for remote viewing and other alleged paranormal abilities, with no positive results under properly controlled conditions. Some of the organizations would provide large monetary rewards to anyone who could demonstrate a supernatural power under fraud-proof and fool-proof conditions.

For the largest paranormal research institution, the James Randi Educational Foundation, out of all of the applicants who applied for the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, nobody has even passed the preliminary tests.